In 1972, Idi Amin stole everything from third-generation Indians living Uganda, and gave them the boot. What happened next is certainly interesting:
The crisis this provoked in Britain at the time has been softened with the passing of the years, but because they were Commonwealth citizens with British passports, the government, in the face of almost universal opposition at home, did the right thing and decided to give them refuge. So 40,000 ethnic Asians arrived in an alien, monocultural group of islands in the clothes they stood up in and the one suitcase holding the meager possessions they had managed to carry with them. Their confusion and distress at having had to leave their country of birth and all their possessions to come to a cold, damp, hostile island must have been almost unendurable.
Back home Idi Amin distributed the property they’d been forced to leave behind among his friends and presided noisily over the decline of Uganda. The Asians, meanwhile, were billeted in drab refugee centers until they found their feet, and they displayed a resilience that still astounds.
What a difference two generations can make.
The British high-circulation Asian newspaper Eastern Eye, in conjunction with The Daily Telegraph of London, has just published its annual list of Britain’s richest Asians. In all, six from East African refugee families made it into the top 10.
It sounds like it was quite advantageous for the family to function as a basic economic unit among these immigrants, something that various social vectors in the US has been making difficult in the past century or so.
And, er - I’m not sure how much it might undermine my snarky post title, but apparently there’s a French version of GSTQ sung in Canada.